Oklahoma
Never have I asked an August sky/Where has last July gone?
It turns out eyelash serum works. Richard has been remarking on my eyelashes when we sit together on the couch, streaming something on his computer. Last night we watched Oklahoma (Kanopy), the 1955 version, and it was great. I mean really great. Not even for a minute will you wonder if your life is draining without meaning into the abyss or consider if, in reality, a comet could hurtle to earth and create an extinction event.
OMG the voice on that Gordon MacRae (Curly). He doesn’t get to act much, but that tenor you can feel filling your whole head as it swells toward the Technicolor sky. The movie is supposed to be set in Oklahoma, obviously. Richard said it was filmed south of Tucson, and they had to bring in the corn. Obviously. You can’t grow corn in Arizona. Obviously. I can’t tell you how badly I wish I didn’t know that.
OMG Rod Steiger as the heavy, Jud Fry! Suddenly, like in five minutes, he’s on set, and the movie gets this black-and-white, Actor’s Studio vibe. He’s always sweating, and you can just hear him telling the director Fred Zinnemann, who is coming at him with a spray bottle, “I have to feel the tension in my body and the sweat will come.” In a bunch of shots, he looks like John Belushi pretending to be as depressed as he really was.
The movie is about sex. It’s entirely about sex. The corn and the cowboys and the farmers, no one cares. The songs are about sex or death. Curly sings “Poor Jud is Dead,” almost like a ballad. Has anyone ever written a song in a musical goading another person to hang himself, so he can imagine people crying at his funeral? After a while, Jud chimes in and Steiger and MacRae harmonize, imagining Jud’s suicide as an act of revenge and resentment. Richard said, “It’s like one of those chat rooms on the internet that urge people to kill themselves.”
Jud, of course, does die, and it’s nothing like the song. No one cares. By this point, he’s shown to be an incel. Once he’s hot for Laurey, who owns the farm where he works, he says he must have her in that growly, choked manner of speech Steiger has. Arousal gives him the right. It’s pretty much spelled out in the dialogue. Jud has also probably killed the family he previously worked for by burning down their house.
Midway through the movie, there’s a dream-sequence ballet, choreographed by Agnes de Mille. Dancers play Curly and Laurey in the sequence, but Steiger plays Jud. He’s the implacable id, drifting in and out of waking life, not just Jud’s but Laurey’s too. It’s her dream, and it works in the film the way dreams work in real life, making no sense and making all the sense in the world. Jud is Laurey’s fear of her desires for Curly. Or the id of the entire, repressed culture of the 1950s.
There are two things I need to mention now. One is I was named after Laurey, with a different spelling. Obviously. (The original stage play debuted in 1943.) The name was my father’s idea. My father thought up cool things for me. He was a generous, playful human in general, and since he was my father, I took his loving nature personally. I thought that’s what men are, some kind of Murray Stone. A lot of men I’ve met are.
Another thing I want to tell you is that James Mitchell, who plays the dream sequence Curly/dancer, later played the snidely Palmer Cortland on the soap opera All My Children. He was also the boyfriend of my friend Seymour’s friend Albert Wolsky, the renowned Hollywood costume designer. Seymour liked to mention that as a de Mille dancer James was known for having great upper body strength and could catch flying women and hold them up steadily. As I was watching the dream ballet, I kept thinking about James’ upper body strength, and sure enough, he’s mostly just carrying around the Laurey dancer, played by Bambi Linn. He hardly gets any dance combinations of his own. Poor James. Also, how cool is it to be named Bambi. Supposing my father had named me Bambi instead of Laurie. How differently might my life have gone? You hear the name Bambi, and you think a deer in headlights. Well, in truth, often I have been a deer in headlights.
In the part of Ado Annie, Gloria Grahame—with her pouty overbite and bedroom eyes—comes trailing the noir glamor and danger she was better known for, and it works for the film and for the goofy way she plays a woman so sexually uncontainable she’s forced to defy her gender assignment. Early on, she sings, “I’m Just a Girl Who Can’t Say No,” an anthem to sex independent of love and even of the humans acting as her sex toys:
I'm just a fool when lights are low
I cain't be prissy an' quaint
I ain't the type that can faint
How can I be what I ain't
I cain't say no
In a sense, Ado Annie is the female counterpart of Jud—two creatures who want what they want. But Ado Annie isn’t rapey. The movie is saying, quite overtly, check out the difference, people.
Shirley Jones, who made her movie debut as Laurey, later reported that before filming began Richard Rogers made a pass at her in his office. She turned him down and said she was “grateful” he didn’t retaliate by firing her. Shortly after Grahame sings her ode to sex, Jones sings another version of the same sentiments. The lyrics are astonishing. I wish I could take them to heart. Two songs, almost back to back, about women’s real feelings:
Why should a woman who is healthy and strong
Blubber like a baby if her man's goes away?
A weepin' an' a whalin' that he's done her wrong
That's one thing you'll never hear me say!
Never gonna think that the man I lose is the only man among men!
I'll snap my fingers to show I don't care
I'll buy me a brand new dress to wear
I'll scrub my neck
And I'll brush my hair
And start all over again!
Many a new face will please my eye
Many a new love will find me
Never have I once looked back to sigh
Over the romance behind me
Many a new day will dawn before I do!
Many a like lad may kiss and fly
A kiss gone by is bygone.
Never have I asked an August sky
"Where has last July gone?"
Never have I wandered through the rye
Wondering "where has some guy gone?"
Many a new day will dawn before I do.
How could a team of Jewish writers, you may be wondering, forget to add a Jew to their mix of characters? They did not. In Oklahoma, the “Jew” is the “Persian” peddler Ali Hakim, who enters as Ado Annie’s man-of-the minute. In reality, Jews were the people selling goods and opening shops in the Western territories—think Deadwood’s Solomon "Sol" Star (John Hawkes), Seth Bullock's best friend and partner in their hardware business and the only Jewish resident of the camp. In Oklahoma, Ali is played by Eddie Albert, whose full name was Edward Albert Heimberger, and Albert plays Ali with an ironic twinkle throughout and an indeterminate accent meant to represent all-purpose foreigner.
It’s a hilarious part, and Ali serves the plot in several ways. Ado Annie’s father has promised her to cowboy Will Parker, if he can come up with $50. It’s a barter deal. His daughter for the dough. Parker, played by the charming dancer Gene Nelson, is not so strong in the brains department, and at one point Ali outmaneuvers him so he will, in fact, get Ado Annie, who then, in the song “All or Nothing,” proclaims her independence from both Will and her father. Later, Ali is the one to save Curly from Jud’s murderous plan.
Albert was married to the Mexican actress, Margo, who was a well-known Hollywood leftist, as was Albert. In 1950, Margo and Albert's names were both published in the right-wing pamphlet Red Channels. He and Margo were blacklisted. In a 1972 interview, their son, the actor Eddie Albert Jr., credited Albert's military service during World War II with ultimately saving his career. His mother was blacklisted for appearing at an anti-Franco rally. “She was branded a Communist,” he said, “was spat upon in the streets, and had to have a bodyguard.”
What makes Oklahoma feel so alive and in its own way weirdly contemporary is that it’s centered on women: Laurey, Ado Annie, and Aunt Eller—what they want and what they can get done. The men flutter around them, or wait, or pressure them. Women drive the action, with Charlotte Greenwood’s Aunt Eller as the town’s fun-loving and get-on-with-it heart. She’s the one who prompts the town’s judge to declare Curly innocent of killing Jud, so he and Laurey can go on their honeymoon.
What does this movie have to do with eyelash serum? What does one thing I am thinking about have to do with the next thought prompted? I see Richard and me on the couch. He’s stealing looks at my lashes. You can’t see your own lashes. You can’t see yourself, period, when you think about it.
The other night, he's asleep and I'm taking off my clothes when I feel an itchy bump on the under side of my arm. It’s a tick, and I need Richard to help me. The ticks that carry disease are tiny. This one is tiny. I've had a tick-borne disease. Not a good idea to get another one. I call out for him to help me. He wakes up and gets out of bed. He has that soft bunny look of still asleep. Then he's right there, like a magic trick. I get the tweezers. He gets an alcohol swab, and I hold the skin in the light, and he gets the tick. I see it come out easily. I say drop it in the toilet. I wipe the ends of the tweezers with the alcohol. We flush the tick away, and I take two doxycyclines I keep in the closet. Richard goes back to bed and says oy. I say oy. What a sweetness.
Biz
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I am so obsessed with Oklahoma and am happy to see its lustiness being celebrated! I love how really experimental things in this movie get a pass because it’s a musical. You might be interested in reading about the original play it’s based on, Green Grows the Lilac. It has kind of a fascinating racial and ethnic history. It was written by a member of the Cherokee tribe, and many of the original characters were white and Native. (And the Persian peddler was originally a Syrian, if I remember correctly.) Anyway, such a good piece of old time American weirdness!
I was mad for Ado Annie -- lipsynched her night and day.